Yes, a bent card can cause your problems. Does your system run fine without the card installed?

Yes, it runs super stable without the DX. I've rarely seen a random restart or BSOD for years till i did this stupid mod and installed dx. Well i thought a got a malfuntioning card first but the second one is running into different problems. The first one lost audio in the rear port completely and this new one re-starts pc and gives bsods.

Some video cards will cause BSODs and lockups due to a card just sagging a bit too much. The EVGA DS 580 version does this.

Well in that case i have no choice except to either get the ASUS D1 (PCI version of this card if they give me a new one) OR i upgrade my mainboard/ram/cpu (corei3 or G630 etc). Get a atx mobo with a good friggin layout!

The DX touches the DIMM slot latches so i had to mod it. Still the dx is a bit bent a bit... that is the only problem. Rest all is fine. Do you feel the DX might be malfuntioning because if this bent? I experience random restarts all the time.

i would never subject a card to that much bend without thinking something. will go hay wire

This has nothing to do with board type. You didn't do your homework to make sure the hardware you bought was compatible.

Let this be a hard lesson learned.

Hard lesson learnt indeed! I did a lot of homework but it didnot workout as i thought it would. I knew the DX won't be a perfect fit on my motherboard but still i went ahead and bought it because a fellow owner of DX had the same motherboard + DX and said he used it (with the bend) without issues. I mentioned board size because ATX is bigger and has more space for slots so i'll always buy ATX next time to make sure i don't run into trivial problems like these (running out of slots!). Anyways i am not sure if the problem is because of the bend. I think it can only be checked if i use it on a diff PC.. what say?

If you try it on another PC and it works fine, then the board is ok. However, the bend may have permanently damaged the traces or connections and it may error out on any machine. There's only one way to find out.

If you try it on another PC and it works fine, then the board is ok. However, the bend may have permanently damaged the traces or connections and it may error out on any machine. There's only one way to find out.

Which way?
Got some helpful info from somewhere :
"I dont know what the problem is with this ASUS card, but I just wanted to point out that the C_Media chipset that ASUS uses in their cards is a PCI chipset and must run through a PCI-E converter chip. So it has no additional bandwidth over the PCI version of the card and if anything will just run into more issues.
I suspect that your BSOD issue may be driver related. All C_Media chipsets use a couple processes named Hsmgr.exe or something like that, this allows the sound card to get a handle on the audio stream and re-route it. For some reason, quite a few people experience serious problems with this process. Anything from BSODs to massive slowdown from excessive CPU usage. I suspect that the process just has a lot of bugs in it."
If this is the case i wonder why so many sound freaks suggest the DX over the D1 when both cards are basically same except the interface with no "real world bandwidth advantage" of the DX. I suspect asus just realeased the DX to give a PCIex1 version of the same card to make it sell more? Or am i getting paranoid here?
I'm sorry if i come out rude. Bought it in may 2012 and i'm still facing problems with it